


Mitsuo

by cheshyrekaat



Series: You have seen me, before. [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-05-23
Packaged: 2018-06-10 04:18:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6939307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheshyrekaat/pseuds/cheshyrekaat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did Devina Fredericks come to be what she is to MI6?<br/>Companion piece to "Haven't I see you before?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mitsuo

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this when I got stuck on "Haven't I seen you before?" I imagine there will be more companion pieces that more I get stuck.

Mitsuo looked down at the small child that he’d been sent to retrieve.

She was barely conscious, covered in blood and tied to a chair. When he took a step, deliberately making noise, she blinked fiercely and hissed at him. Her body strained against her bindings and she tossed her head back, trying to see through her hair. 

She was delightfully defiant.

He walked over to the chair she was tied to and spoke to her, calm and deliberate. 

“Devina Fredericks, I am here to take you to your grandmother.”

She just stared at him with her jaw clenched and her eyes burning with determination. He could see that she was going to fight him as soon as he untied her. She was practically mummified with the ropes wrapped around her body and he wanted to chuckle, but thought she would likely misunderstand. He was amused that this tiny girl could have caused so much trouble that she had to be bound so thoroughly. 

As he stepped out of her line of sight, she started grunting with the effort of getting free of her bonds. He crouched behind her chair and loosened the knots. She was squirming out of the ropes before they had even finished falling down her body. She staggered as she stood and didn’t look back at him as she started toward the door. She managed about two steps before she fell. He watched her as she tried to struggle back to her feet and she fell again and then started to crawl when her legs wouldn’t hold her up.

He was impressed by her drive and her refusal to give up. He rose from his crouch and walked toward where she was pulling herself along with her arms. She had not verbalized at all, and as soon as she was free of the rope had put all of her efforts into escape. He reached down to roll her over and she swung her arms at him and tied to kick him, baring her teeth until he got close enough for her to try to bite. 

He held her down with his left hand on her stomach. She was too tiny to have the reach to connect with his body. He reached into his pocket with his right hand, pulling out a hypodermic needle that medical had provide him with in case she needed sedation. As he went to pull the cap off with his teeth, she struggled with new energy, her eyes on the needle. She managed to twist under his hand and almost get wriggled away from him before he tightened his grip on her and sank the needle into her backside and depressed the plunger.

He smiled and picked her up in his arms, holding her carefully as her struggles weakened. He walked back up and out of the basement he’d found her in. He didn’t worry about being caught, everyone that had been in the house was already dead.

It was time to take her to her new home.

*

He followed along behind her as she made her way through the building that housed MI6. 

He had brought her to her grandmother, as requested. She was in medical for a time, for dehydration and she had some deep bruising. She still hadn’t verbalized, making her wants known in other ways. She tried to do everything independently of others. She didn’t want help and wanted to not need help.

She was too young for those desires to be true.

He had found out that she was only five years old. Where he had found her was not where she had been taken from. She’d had a family. Mother, father, brother, all dead. Their killings were brutal, done as painfully as possible. Likely tortured for information. He thought it probable that she had seen it and was not talking because she believed it to be futile. 

Torture did strange things to those who survived it.

She was clever, this child. She had a quality that he appreciated. She was able to make her way, unseen by others until she needed to interact and achieve something that she couldn’t on her own. She had made her way far into q-branch before she’d met up with a locked door. She unerringly found the department head (she must have been shown pictures of them) and because he knew who she was, he’d given her a tour that had included the places behind locked doors, showing her his gadgets and telling her what they did. She was charming, even though she was silent, and not above playing on the pity of the people around her.

Interesting.

He watched her in the training rooms. She stood in corners watching the seasoned agents spar with one another. She sat at the back of the rooms where groups of recruits were being trained, absorbing information at an alarming pace. He’d observed her practicing katas more than once in empty spaces, and sometimes repeating kicks and punches that she had seen others be taught.

She was terribly concerned with violence.

He found her once in the accounting department. Someone had set her at an empty desk with a reading program pulled up on an unused computer. She was using the mouse and clicking through the program, intently with headphones on. He noticed that she had only covered one ear with them and was never startled by people walking up on her. The reading program advanced and soon she was using a typing program and then she was devouring information rapidly, learning everything, and eventually learning the language of the computer itself.

She was not resting, she was determined to understand the world she found herself in.

Later, he found her in the Information Technology department, once again on an unused computer at and empty desk. Here, she was using math programs. It seemed backward to him, but it worked out for her. He later realized that she had found the best people to teach her how to learn the subjects that she was interested in. That they didn’t seem in the appropriate department was no fault of hers.

She could find information that others didn’t know and use it to her advantage.

*

When she finally spoke, she was six years old. She shocked everyone.

She was in q-branch, at the time and saved several lives by telling the technician that she was ‘helping’ how they were wiring the housing for some explosives wrong, according to the schematics they were working from. It was the resulting blow-up when the technician took offense and tried to kick her out that brought attention to the situation. Devina was so adamant that the technician was wrong and Major Boothroyd, Q, was so happy to hear her speak that he took her back to the work table and went over the schematic and housing with her, wire by wire.

She had been right. It should not have to be said that the technician was fired.

Of course, Mitsuo was there to see it happen. He made sure the technician wouldn’t be a danger to MI6 ever again. Someone willing to fight with a child, whom everyone agreed was brilliant, rather than entertain the idea that they might be wrong was too stupid to live, in his opinion. He was in the habit of making his opinion felt.

The next time he heard her speak was when her grandmother announced that she was to start school. She did not have a fit. She did not, however, agree. She had a quiet, intense discussion with her grandmother about the benefits of being around children her own age that she didn’t understand, at all. She allowed that she had no experience and so couldn’t effectively argue against it. 

When the conversation was over, her grandmother allowed that maybe Devina had spent too much time in her office listening to her reprimand 00 agents, negotiating with foreign allies and posturing with politicians. After all, the argument had actually been difficult for her to win. Against a six year old that had just spoken for the second time in over a year.

After that, she spoke all the time. She asked all the pent up questions that she had for all the people she had convinced to teach her all the things she should really have no idea about. No one was reprimanded for the amount of time they spent answering her question and teaching her what she wanted to know. She had already set the precedent that she was allowed all the time she wanted with employees she chose to occupy her time.

She was a more active participant in q-branch. She was now being monitored at all times, but allowed to assemble thing for herself. They didn’t let her get off with things that could kill her, yet, but they did let her learn to use a soldering iron. She asked questions about what she was doing, all the time. She often found redundant circuitry and wasted space in many items and was a catalyst for change in designing new items for field agents.

In the IT department, she learned about networks and how computers were linked together in the building. She quickly discovered how to look at information stored on anyone’s computer. When she learned about the Internet and how, in the simplest terms, it was just a large network, she asked pertinent questions that led to the Information Security department becoming its own division.

The day before she started school, Mitsuo talked to her for the first time since he had collect her for her grandmother.

She went to school and did well, keeping most of her knowledge to herself and observing the interactions between children. She learned about herd mentality and prison yard rules. While she kept mostly to herself, she socialized enough to avoid unwanted adult attention and held her own against any bullies who thought her slightly American accent was weird and worth ridicule.

The day that she went to school, Mitsuo went to speak to her grandmother. He had a conversation with her that revealed how much she didn’t know about Devina’s time in MI6. She agreed that someone needed to take her in hand and her learning should be formalized so that she understood what it meant to be a part of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was agreed that Mitsuo was perfect for the job.

As Mitsuo took on his new position, many people took note that 007 stopped going on missions and they wrote it off as inconsequential. M ran MI6 and had proved many times that she knew what she was doing.

If her grandmother did not know that he had been waiting for someone promising to take as student for some time, she was not at fault. She didn’t learn about all that Mitsuo chose to teach Devina for years.

*

Mitsuo looked into the car and felt a surge of satisfaction. 

One of the dead bodies was left by his protégé. It was a quick and efficient kill, as he’d taught her. She’d obviously caught him by surprise. She wouldn’t have been able to do it, otherwise, but she had kept her head.

He wondered how she would respond to having actually killed someone. 

He pushed the thought aside and went to check the body for any information to lead him to where she’d been taken. Mitsuo had known this was coming, but he wouldn’t have allowed her to be taken if he had known the danger was so imminent. He had been in a meeting with her grandmother to discuss his concerns when the car had been attacked.

He was in luck. The body had ID on it. Even if it was a fake ID, it would give him some information. He took a set of prints from the body and checked the driver, as well. No reason to overlook something that might be obvious. He could have been involved, after all.

He went back to MI6 while the car was impounded and towed to the q-branch garage. They had a splendid forensics team and Medical did have people and the needed equipment to perform a medical examination and autopsy.

He made his way to Information Services to give them a description of the dead man so they could enter the parameters into the system and look for matches in the local and Interpol database for a match. He needed to know the man’s known associates.

He pushed aside his worry about Devina as time went by and they didn’t have any leads. He knew he just had to be patient and he imagined that she was holding her own. She’d done it three years ago, there was no reason to think that she wouldn’t now.

He endured the diatribes from the department heads as they all waited for information on who had taken Devina and where. Staff who could were looking for any leaks, any tips, any suspicious movements of enemies with this kind of MO. They were all holding their breath, waiting for a break in the information.

They got their break 48 hours later and Mitsuo went on a trip out of England to go get her. He was away before anyone even knew that he was going. He didn’t stop to tell anyone or get any equipment. He just went to retrieve what was his.

It was almost exactly the same, the way he found her this time. 

She was locked in a basement. She was almost mummified, they had used so much rope to tie her to the chair.   
She was covered in blood and her hair was hanging in her face.

The difference was that she was unconscious. From what little of her skin that he could see, a good portion of the blood was hers. 

This time when he untied the ropes and they slid down her body, she slumped to the floor and stayed there. She didn’t try to run, she didn’t try to crawl, and she didn’t try to pull herself along with her arms. It disturbed him to see her so lifeless. 

He picked her up into his arms, carefully and carried her up the stairs and out of the house. He again didn’t worry about anyone else in the house, they were all dead, though the wounds he inflicted were not the only wounds they had. His protégé had gotten her own blows in as well. He smiled with grim satisfaction at the thought.

She was eight years old.

*

He had feared that she would once again retreat into silence.

He should have feared her determination to never be a victim, again.

To be fair, she was more quiet than she had been. She was more cautious with words and with people. She watched more intently, even from the hospital bed where she was given a fluid drip with painkillers that she didn’t want but had no control over. She began, so young, to learn to think around the drugs. 

She looked at him from the bed and they started at each other quietly. She said one thing to him.

“I need to learn more.”

He understood. He had been teaching her at a slow pace. He’d made a routine out of her learning in the branches and she was thriving there, but the physical had been much slower. It was time for her to learn more and at a faster pace. She needed to learn evasion and how to handle a group of attackers. It would be some time before she would actually have the strength to gain the upper hand, but even now, with surprise on her side, she could do something, she could get away. 

He nodded at her and turned to leave.

He got the agents involved. He took her to the training rooms and taught her where they could be seen. The other agents took it with good nature, already used to teaching her deadly things. The year before she had found her way to the firing range and persuade them to teach her to shoot various guns. She had already stated the basics of sniper training.

She took part in group training sessions with seasoned agents and new recruits. They were very gentle with her, but that was to be expected. Her grandmother would string them up if she were actually hurt on the premises. It was for the knowledge; she would apply it elsewhere.

He began to take her out into the city and she learned to blend with the shadows. He set people on her and she learned, the hard way, the only way, to spot a tail and how to evade them. He had to retrieve her many times, in the beginning. It was not a game, after all, and they were set on her to take her. He felt no remorse at the deaths of these men. They preyed on children, after all.

He taught her more and she began to escape on her own. She felt no remorse at the deaths of those men, either.

She learned to follow. He set her on people. Not to kill, not yet, but to gather information. This was something she did naturally; follow, move unseen through a crowd, learn the things that others didn’t know and use it in her favor. She’d been doing it for years, already. Now, it was just being refined.

Her lessons paid off when two years later when she spotted that her driver was not her driver. He was late in picking her up which already had her on guard. When he did not exit to open the door for her, she cautiously opened it for herself. She slammed it shut and ran. There had been someone in the back seat. They tried to follow her.

She managed to shake them and she got to MI6 and in the building. Mitsuo went out and looked for them, but only found the abandon car with no traces of the men that had been inside.

Her driver was found, dead, two days later. 

She was ten.

*

Of course her grandmother wanted the best for her. She was being enrolled into public school. She had to have a physical to complete her application.

While Devina was at the doctor, she was drugged, cleverly when her blood was being drawn. She was able to think and resist many drugs, but this was just to pass her into unconsciousness. It took a distressing amount of time for anyone to realize that she was gone.

This time, Mitsuo was not allowed to go after her alone. For all their clever planning, the people behind it had not covered their tracks well. When they found the estate where she was being held, it was eerily quiet as he and his compatriot slid quietly inside the house to look for her. 

They did not find her. She was in none of the rooms they passed. They found four panicked men and one woman in a room, discussing (babbling really) about how she’d freed herself and half of them were dead. They didn’t know where she was and they wanted to run, frightened of what the person who paid them would do when he found out she was gone.  
Mitsuo faded back and went to look around while his companion waited and listened, hoping for more intelligence to report back with before they killed the people that had taken their gem. 

What he found pleased him. He found where she’d been kept. They had been foolish enough to think that locking her in a windowless room would be enough. It looked like she had broken apart a chair and a dresser, using a screw and a chair leg to pop the hinges on the door. She had taken the risk of noise and getting caught in order to get out. A chair leg and a screw were handy weapons to her and she’d used them.

There were two dead men outside that room and their guns were missing.

He found two more dead, along the most direct path that led outside the house. She’d found a blade, these kills were much neater and done because they were in her way, rather than for any other reason. Their guns had been left on the bodies, but the magazines were gone.

As he followed her trail out the door, he contemplated what this showed that she needed to learn. She would have to get better at covering her tracks in a situation like this. It wouldn’t do for anyone with skills, unlike the people left in the house, to be able to track her movements.

He was able to see where she’d been casing the house. He thought she’s been going to try to kill the rest of them. She was correct, it wouldn’t do to leave them alive to report her abilities. He found her where she was cautiously making her way toward the house to regain entrance. She had seen where the five conspirators had located themselves and was going to move to reduce their numbers. 

The agent that had come with him complete the task before she could. She observed the event and dropped one gun in the brush, hiding the other behind her back and allowed the agent to find her in the shrubbery. 

He was proud as she held him steadily at gunpoint and made him give her the proper phrases to prove that he was from her grandmother, rather than MI6. She didn’t trust them, completely the way she did Mitsuo and her only kin left.

He stepped out behind her but she didn’t relax until he signaled to her that the way was clear. He didn’t have to carry her home, this time. 

He made sure that it was not mentioned in the report that she had, without a doubt, killed four men, just that they had been dead when they arrived.

She was thirteen.

*

The next year, her grandmother found out what Mitsuo had been teaching her.

She was called to come and speak to a detective at NSY where Devina was being held for questioning in the deaths of two men in a tube station. She took Mitsuo and Tanner, her chief of staff, with her. Medical had been dispatched to the morgue, and their forensics team had been sent to the crime scene. They all had the required credentials with them to be granted access and over-ride any possible objection. 

Devina had maintained her silence from the moment the police had arrived on the scene, called by onlookers. She sat in an interrogation room, not looking at the camera pointed at her from the corner. She kept a nervous, half-frightened look on her face and showed nothing but relief when her grandmother walked through the door, contorting her face, and looking down to hide the fact that she shed no tears.

Her grandmother was far from stupid. Tanner was making sure that nothing happening in the room was recorded and Mitsuo was outside the room, making sure that no one was close enough to see the exchange about to happen. 

As her grandmother sat down across the table from her, Devina looked up and saw not Olivia Mansfield, but M. She straightened up and allowed the false emotion to fall from her face and looked at M, calmly. M smiled slightly at this and spoke firmly.

“Tell me what happened.”

And Devina told her. It was as concise an after action report as she had ever heard. No color, no speculation, no artifice. Just the facts. The men had been following her all day, so she had gotten on the tube and rode it around, changing lines often, to make sure she was correct. They stayed with her and managed to catch up to her in a corridor between lines when she’d been held up by the press of bodies trying to get onto the train. They had tried to take her and she had refused to be taken. The man that had been leading her from behind had gotten a knife to the femoral artery, twisted and bled out, quickly. The man in front of her, she had stabbed under his sternum, knife angled to his left side when he’d turned and lunged to grab her. She saw people around her calling the police, so she had dropped the knife, collapsed to the floor and begun to weep until the police arrived and took her to the station. 

That was all.

M looked at her for a few moments before she nodded sharply and said, “We will have you out of here, momentarily.”

She rose and walked out of the room, Mitsuo holding the door for her. As he closed it behind her, he turned to see Devina’s grandmother staring at him with a hardened look in her eye. 

“Are you proud?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

Once Devina was out of the station and in MI6 custody, the bodies, the evidence, the reports all disappeared within 24 hours. 

Devina’s grandmother never asked Mitsuo about what he taught Devina again, but M did.

She was fourteen. 

*

Mitsuo continued to teach Devina, having to dig deep to continue to teach her the things that she learned so well. 

She continued to be an active participant in q-branch, learning and executing new designs. They gave her old plans and schematics of devices and allowed her to re-design them. Some things she was successful with and the agents were given new, more efficient toys to take into the field with them. She had graduated from the soldering iron to oxy-fuel welding and so on, until she was proficient with all forms. 

She especially enjoyed that.

She still worked on understanding computer networks and security. She had a scary aptitude for it and they had to watch out for her need to crack the firewalls of other secret keeping organizations. She reviewed code and spent many late nights shoring up the defenses of MI6, keeping their own secrets safe.

She haunted accounting, the staff there still loving her. She learned their trade, as well, and could produce any of the things they needed when shorthanded due to illness and leave. She did like to be helpful, so helped out where she could.

She passed her sniper qualifications in secret. Mitsuo took her out to the countryside and thoroughly tested her abilities, satisfied that she knew all that she could learn without field experience. She was also more than qualified on all the weapons used by agents in the field. The 00s often were found in groups with her in the firing range, giving each other hell as she out shot them all.

As she had gotten older, the agents had also gotten less gentle with her as they continued to train her in physical combat. She did very well in that arena, not beating them more than a handful of times, so as not to damage their sense of their own abilities. Mitsuo made sure that throwing fights was not trained into her. 

Only two agents made the mistake of trying to teach her to throw knives. Her knowledge of hand thrown projectiles far exceed anything they would ever know themselves.

She continued to do well in school, advancing faster than anticipated. She thrived in an environment that challenged her, mentally and physically. That was not what school did for her, but she didn’t let the keep her from doing it right. She’d been able to pass sixth form exams long before she reached sixth form, even having entered sixth form years early.

When she finished sixth form, she spend a day locked in her grandmother’s office with her. When she emerged, she went to Mitsuo and told him what she was doing. He went with her to post her acceptance of a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She spent that summer strengthening her relationships with her grandmother and M, as well as Tanner. She lessened the time she spent at MI6 proper and there were less and less people who knew Devina well. She trained in the city and in the country, sharpening her skills to apply them over any kind of terrain.

Late in the summer, just before early fall, she left for Boston, Massachusetts. 

The day she left was the day the 007 was given a long term assignment to the United States.

She was sixteen.

*

He watched her come alive in her new environment. 

She was in her element, surrounded by people who were as smart as she was and even a few who were smarter. She did well in her studies and had a few acquaintances whose company she enjoyed for their own sake.

They enjoyed the city. They enjoyed New England. During her breaks and long weekends, they did not go back to England, but explored the whole country, plying their trade and honing their skills. He still set people on her, he had to make sure she was adaptable to new and different places. 

Weapons were easier in the States. It was easier for them to hide what they were. As she matured, their relationship became more relaxed. As she got older and more proficient, she became less his student, and more his colleague. Almost his friend. He treasured her.

It hurt him, somehow, when she started to feel the pains of the person she was. She had no regrets and no guilt about her skill set and the way she lived, but she felt the pangs of adolescence and frustration as she realized that she was not how she was expected to be. She made some bad decisions but always learned from her mistakes. Few people were meant to be a part of her life, and even less were to be trusted with herself.

He was almost jealous when Tristan King arrived at MIT. He was young, gangly and beautiful with a brilliant mind that could keep up with her. They were inseparable from almost the moment they came together. They fell into their friendship naturally and had two things been different, would have been lovers like the world had never seen. As it was, they loved each other in a way that he knew no one would ever be able to come between. Not even him.

He knew because he tried.

She found him crouched over Tristan while he was sleeping, with one of the knives she had made him in hand. 

She attacked him.

The sound of the impact brought Tristan out of sleep and he fumbled for his glasses and turned on the lamp next to his bed. Once it was light enough to see, he still could not tell you what he was seeing. Two blurs of movement, clashing and barely breaking apart before coming back together, again and again. It was unnerving how they made no sound other than the movement of cloth and the swish of quick movements. He started to notice blood appearing on his floor and the walls. He was petrified and frozen.

Finally, Devina was thrown free, and recognized her as she rolled across the floor and into a ready crouch, knife in each hand, blades along her forearms, facing the shadow that had coalesced into a man whom he’d seen in her company before. Tristan had thought he was one of her tutors. 

The man spoke, hash sounds that weren’t English.

She only said, “Yes.” She said it firmly, with no breaks and no room for deviation in her voice.

The man bowed to her, sheathing his knife, and she stood, sheathing her knives as she also bowed. 

“I understand,” she said, “this changes nothing. But he will know.”

There were more harsh sounds from the man. Tristan thought it might be Japanese but he was unsure.

“Then I will take care of it,” she was still firm. “You know that I will.”

The man nodded and stepped forward, as did Devina, and they met next to Tristan’s bed and turned to him. They were both in a bloody mess of clothing.

“Tristan,” she said, grinning at him, “this is my Shihan, Mitsuo.”

It was understandable that Tristan stuttered a moment before his eyes rolled back and he passed out.

(If you asked Tristan about the day he met Mitsuo, he will pale and shiver before refusing to speak of it.)

She was seventeen.

*

She had disappeared.

Tristan was frantic when he contacted Mitsuo, who had gone to London to report to her grandmother about how she was doing and the reports she’d received about the mischief she and her friend had been getting into.

He’d also gone to report to M about the status of his trainee.

When he excused himself to take the call he didn’t notice the glower on M’s face, completely caught by the name on his caller ID. This was unexpected.

As soon as he answered, Tristan’s panicked voice was chattering at him and he took minutes to calm the boy so that he could understand what the problem was. He, like Devina, was quite taken with the boy, though he’d never admit it.

Devina was gone. 

She’d had a late meeting with her adviser and never made it back to either his dorm or her flat. He could find no sign of her, and she wasn’t answering her phones. The CCTV for her building hadn’t record her coming or going after she had left for classes the previous day. 

He looked at his watch, it was 10:00 which meant 05:00 in Boston. She wouldn’t have gone this long without contacting Tristan if she were alright. He told Tristan that he would be on the next flight to Boston and to sit tight. They’d find her.

When he hung up the phone, he looked at M and just said that he had to go. He was sure that she had pieced it together from his end of the conversation, anyway. She dismissed him with one sentence.

“Make her safe.”

He nodded at her and left.

When he arrived in Boston, he took a cab to the Devina’s flat to see if he could find anything there and sent a text to Tristan on the way to notify him of his arrival. Tristan was at the apartment by the time he got there.

They looked for her. Exhaustively. The looked at CCTV footage, which there was little of. They checked the airports, which was chaotic; 9/11 was a recent reality. They checked her usual routes through campus and the city, over and over. They checked her unusual routes, as well. They checked the bars, the nightclubs, and the chatter in Boston’s criminal world (thanks to Mitsuo’s own connections). They tried to find out if she had enemies, tried to subtly try to find out if anyone knew who she was and what she did.

There was nothing. No trace of her, no word of her. There was nothing out of place, anywhere, just a gaping hole in their lives where she should be. They were both quietly frantic and leaning on each other, encouraging to not give up and trying to give each other new ideas about where and how to look. Their nerves were stretched thin and they were close to breaking. 

Both of them.

When she returned, quietly letting herself into her home, she was silent and made no noise. She found them both in her living room. Tristan slumped back on her couch, head back, snoring loudly, laptop open on his lap. She could see the lines of stress in his face and the dark circles under his eyes. She turned to Mitsuo, in her arm chair. His eyes were now open and he was looking at her, evaluating. If she hadn’t known his face so well, she wouldn’t have noticed the tell-tale signs around his eyes that gave away the stress of the situation for him.

It had been two weeks since she had disappeared.

He looked her over, carefully, evaluating. She had lost weight, rapidly, about 15 lbs. by the look of her. She was swaying with exhaustion, willpower holding her upright. She was in cheap, box store clothing. Jeans and a t-shirt with a hooded sweatshirt pulled over the top. She was more pale than she usually was. It was alarming.

Tristan woke when she collapsed on the floor. 

Tristan stayed with her in the hospital. She was malnourished, dehydrated and when they’d gotten her clothing off, they found her body covered and bruises and contusions. She had signs of systematic torture, several cuts on her body were infected. She refused to say a word to anyone about it. She did not respond to questioning and other than her body, there was no evidence as to what had happened. If she said nothing, nothing could be done.

She pressed a slip of paper into his hand. It was a set of coordinates. He went and found where she had been. He had to use a local clean-up crew to cover her so well learned lessons. There were three dead bodies and he found the room she’d been kept in. He would never tell another what he found there. They would have died much more painfully if he’d found her before she’d escaped.

She had just turned 18.

*

It took some time, but he saw her come back out of her shell. The three of them knew that she wouldn’t quite be the same, again, but she retained enough of herself to be the person they knew and loved. She didn’t push them away.

She became more self-contained. She cared less for people that weren’t Tristan, Mitsuo or her grandmother. She never was unarmed anymore, and every new person or situation was a threat until proved otherwise. She wasn’t over the top, she was trained very well, but she’d never been as vigilant as she’d become.

Her grandmother came for her graduation. It was lovely to see them reunited. They were both stoic, very English, but the love they held for one another shined through. They had, of course, kept in touch. Grandmother knew all about her life. The usual things, anyway, that you would tell your guardian about.

The reports that she had sent to M were a different matter. They held different details. She had treated MIT like a long term, deep cover mission to gather Intel on a suspected organization. M knew more about MIT and the people there than she’d ever thought to know. The IT department and q-branch had a field day with much of the data that she’d sent on. MI6 was light years ahead of anyone when it came to computers and general tech.

M was introduced to Tristan after her grandmother was. Both meetings went better than expected. By the time she left, she was as enamored with the boy as Mitsuo was. She would have him for MI6 and for Devina as soon as she could.

He left with her grandmother. They had things to discuss and Devina wanted to close up her flat and spend some time with Tristan before going home. 

When she arrived at Heathrow in London, she didn’t take a car home. She called MI6, officially, requesting a cleanup crew and an escort to headquarters. Mitsuo got there first.

He entered the private jet they had chartered for her cautiously. He ghosted through the passenger cabin, noting the two dead men on board before approaching the cockpit and gently pushing the unlatched door open. 

He found Devina in the co-pilot’s seat, gun steadily pointed from her lap at the man who had pilot the plane. He just raised his eyebrows at her.

“I convinced him to follow the original flight plan,” was all she said. 

He then noticed that the pilot was pale from blood loss and had bandages wrapped around one hand. She had done well. This was something he’d hesitated to teach her, but she had learned it, anyway.

The rest of the crew and her escort arrived. They cleared the bodies and took the pilot into custody. He didn’t survive his interrogation, he was already too weak. 

Mitsuo stood by her as she watched the cleanup crew leave and he joined her in the car that would take her to M.   
They had new things to discuss. She had been a target too much, she would never be safe as things were, now.  
It was decided that she had to die. Being the only living kin of the head of the British Secret Service was nothing that would ever be safe for her. She and her grandmother spent a few days together before she disappeared in an auto accident. 

MI6 grieved.

Rumors began that people named 000.

Mitsuo looked upon her, cradled her face in his hands and look into her eyes. 

“I have no more to teach you,” he said to her.

They embraced for the first and last time. Mitsuo told Devina good-bye.

If anyone noticed that 007 was reported killed in action, they didn’t connect it to the loss of the child that had been such a part of their lives and jobs. They didn’t connect it with the rumors that an actual assassin was working for MI6. They just noted that the year had been cruel.

She was twenty-two.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is welcome and encouraged.


End file.
